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IIT Delhi will introduce a new curriculum in July 2025, focusing on flexibility, sustainability, and AI exposure. The institute is also enhancing mental health support and PhD placements, IIT-Delhi Director Prof Rangan Banerjee told News18.
IIT-Delhi Director Professor Rangan Banerjee (Image: News18)
Greater flexibility to pick courses, studying sustainability as a must and every graduate student to have exposure to AI, are some of the key changes to be introduced as part of the new curriculum at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Delhi, which is set to be rolled out from July 2025 for each discipline.
The institute’s director Prof Rangan Banerjee elaborated on the major changes underway – creating a “living policy” on AI, expanding personalised mental health support for students, and streamlining placements – in an interview with News18.
Excerpts From The Interview
Q: What are the major changes the institute plans to introduce as part of its curriculum review, which was to be implemented from 2025?
Prof Rangan Banerjee: We had an institute-level curriculum committee and then we had a discussion in the senate, so now we have a direction as to where we are moving with the curriculum. Now, we are in a phase where each academic unit is reworking its curriculum. So, essentially the idea is that we are trying to provide flexibility in the curriculum, we are also trying to incorporate in it elements of sustainability and for every graduate to have a reasonable understanding and exposure to Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. Flexibility here means in terms of picking courses such that students have a wide range of subjects of their interest to go along with their major domain. Sustainability comes under environment, so for students to either take specific courses in it or tell us how they can integrate it with their major domain. The entire exercise is aimed at improving the students’ learning experience and make them more future-ready. We are also getting extensive stakeholder feedback on this, which includes students and industry experts. There is also focus on having a component where most students get the experience of working in teams. This is the first complete comprehensive curriculum review that is being done in over a period of 10 years. This is being done for all programmes. So, we are looking at the structure as well as the content. Once we have the review completed for each unit and it is approved by the senate, we will roll it out around July this year. All IITs and even other institutions world over do curriculum review over a period.
The other thing we have embarked upon is an external review of each academic unit by teams of international faculty and industry experts. We have tied up with some of the top global universities like Oxford and Princeton, with people who are leaders in their respective fields. So, we have clusters of international faculty and industry people visiting the campus to review each unit, who will give their recommendations, and we will also get to see how we are doing as an institution vis-a-vis these global institutions.
Q: Exposure to AI is a major part of the changes being considered in the curriculum. Also, the institute had set up a committee to come up with a policy on AI. What are the new guidelines on use of AI?
Prof Rangan Banerjee: An exposure and understanding of AI will be critical to every graduate at the institute, irrespective of the discipline they are pursuing, which means even for those pursuing courses in humanities or other domains, to have had courses in AI. We need to be able to give some generative AI tools for every student. AI is affecting every aspect of our lives, the educational process, and the research process. It’s a fast-moving domain. So, it was decided to have a set of operating guidelines on the fair and responsible use of AI. For example, what can I use ChatGPT for? We created a committee of experts from computer science and AI, including students and faculty, which deliberated on it and came out with a set of guidelines. We will also be training people for it. And, the guidelines are not static, these are evolving, it’s like a living document, which will keep getting updated from time to time.
Q: The institute made some crucial academic policy changes to improve mental health support for students including, modifying termination clauses, relaxing overall CGPA criteria and establishing an ‘Academic Progress Group’ to help students struggling with backlogs, over the past two years. What has been the outcome?
Prof Rangan Banerjee: It’s a work in progress. There’s lot to be done. We have a very diverse class, this is mainly we are talking about the undergraduate students, a large batch of students coming in. We are trying to create more personalised support for students since numbers are large. We are trying to do more with the Academic Progress Group by having more student mentors. The outcomes are there with students able to clear backlogs now. It is moving in the right direction; we have to scale the numbers and institutionalise it more. Earlier, it was left to just students, but now we have been tracking those with backlogs and data for the same is consolidated and shared with the departments, which then have an interface and engage with them. A good sign is that now students are responding and opening to the process. One aspect is better mental health support, but even for others it’s helpful since they can plan better and complete their courses in time.
Q: The institute recently adopted a new methodology for placing PhD students. How is it shaping up? Also, there has been a shift in recruitment trend overall, how has the ongoing placements season been so far?
Prof Rangan Banerjee: Unlike the Bachelors and Masters, PhD is not a time-bound programme. PhD is unique in the sense that each PhD scholar is an expert in their field. So, the general uptake of PhD students in an industry is not very clear. We don’t have many companies saying we want to take PhD students. By and large, earlier PhDs were out of placements, it was done through individual faculty, and people would apply on their own. So, now we have created a structure for it, and we are seeing some results. We have a lathe number of PhD students. Last year we had 480 PhD students graduating, of which more than 200 were women students, which is a good number for an IIT. The pathway for their recruitment is different than the others. We are planning to do more to further streamline PhD placements.
About the shift in trend, we haven’t exactly analysed the data for each discipline so far and we need to look at long-term data to study this, but it’s clear that things are changing and it’s a global phenomenon. Speaking of overall placements, this year has been reasonably good despite these changes, the placements have improved in terms of number of offers and recruiters.
